The morning sun crested the jagged black serrations of the eastern Spine on Day 28, flooding the southern Blackglass overlook with blinding, amber-gold light.
Below them, the dark fiery rock that had battered their boots for eight grueling days came to an abrupt, total end. The black dark rock dropped away in a sheer, three-hundred-foot fault scarp, yielding to the vast, shimmering expanse of the Saltglass country. A huge white basin of bitter salt flats, sun-baked stone terraces, and distant dry salt sinks that stretched south to the horizon like a frozen sea. The blasting heat already pulsed from the lower plain. It carried the sharp, chemical reek of soda ash and dried salt water.
Through the morning air, sight mirages were already distorting the lower horizon. Distant white stone ridges appeared to float above shimmering ribbons of silver water that didn’t exist, their shapes wavering and elongating in the rising heat currents.
Kezra Venn stood on the lip of the overlook, her hand resting on the smooth dark rock low roof wall. Behind her, an unbroken thread of forty-four walked miles stretched northward across the mountain Spine to her mother’s limeworks in Kilnstep.
“Rider coming up the switchback,” Yseld Arken announced quietly. She stepped between two projecting rocks and grounding her ash climbing staff.
